TikTok Gets Yet Another Reprieve from President Trump
Credit: Solen Feyissa
Toggle Dark Mode
Raise your hand if you thought TikTok would ever be banned under the watchful eye of the Trump Administration. Anyone? Bueller?
In a move that should surprise no one, President Donald Trump has signed yet another executive order granting TikTok an additional 90 days to live before the ban hammer goes down — at least in theory.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the extension in a statement to CNN yesterday, stating that the President will “sign an additional Executive Order this week to keep TikTok up and running.”
As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark. This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”
Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary
For those keeping count at home, this marks the third time the President has granted clemency to the Chinese-owned social media network, which was initially supposed to be banned on January 19, a date that was set in early 2024 in a bill called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA). The bill received widespread support from both sides of the House and Senate and was signed into law by President Joe Biden.
That started the clock ticking on a nine-month divestment period during which TikTok parent company ByteDance was supposed to find a “non-adversarial” buyer for the social network. That would presumably be a US-based company, although it’s likely a buyer in nearly any country other than China would have done fine.
However, ByteDance refused to sell and appealed the ruling instead, claiming that banning TikTok would violate the First Amendment. The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit disagreed with that claim, as did the Supreme Court, which upheld PAFACA and the TikTok ban in a unanimous 9-0 decision.
Whether by coincidence or design, the January 19 deadline was the day before the Presidential Inauguration. Of course, nobody knew who was going to win the election when that date was set. Still, it made for an interesting kerfuffle as US-based services providers like Oracle and Akamai had to obey the government order, which has been upheld by the highest court in the land. They pulled the plug on TikTok late on January 18 to ensure everything would be shut down when the calendar turned over to the following day, but less than 24 hours later, TikTok was back up and running after then-President Elect Trump promised to stay the ban as soon as he took office.
True to his word, a 75-day extension was among the first of the staggering pile of executive orders the President signed on January 20. The President doesn’t have the authority to reverse a law passed by Congress, so instead he simply ordered the US Justice Department, which is part of the executive branch, to delay enforcement of the law.
This was enough to convince TikTok’s service providers, but it took more assurances before Apple and Google were willing to return TikTok to their respective app stores.
Since then, it’s been business as usual for TikTok and its US-based users. No one is quite sure what’s been going on behind the scenes as Trump reportedly tries to negotiate ways to meet the PAFACA requirements of US ownership. Even if ByteDance were willing to sell, which is far from a certainty, there’s no word about any formal offers on the table. Several possible investors have expressed interest, including Larry Elison of Oracle, Jimmy Donaldson (aka YouTuber MrBeast), Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank, former US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, and billionaire Frank McCourt.
There was also a last-minute offer from Amazon in early April, just before the first 75-day clock was about to run out. However, reports suggest that nobody took that bid seriously.
According to an early April report from The Verge, an imminent deal between ByteDance and a coalition led by Oracle — the only one the White House was seriously considering — died when Trump “went nuclear on tariffs.” Any deal would require the blessing of the Chinese government, and Beijing was in no mood to play ball after being hit with a 145% levy on exports to the US.
A few days later, Trump signed a second 75-day extension, which brings us to this week. Even though things have cooled down a bit in Trump’s trade war with China, there’s been no recent news, even from insiders, that this deal — or any other— is back on the table. That doesn’t mean Trump and his advisors might not be working on something much more deeply behind the scenes, but at this point, it’s starting to seem that the President will keep resetting the clock every 75 to 90 days.
